of such thoroughness and brutality that any attempt to reunify Germany would risk a civil war worse than the one Spain had suffered. A reunited Germany, should that nonetheless prove possible, would probably be “indigestible” for the rest of Europe: “We should, therefore, make a virtue of necessity and cling to the split Germany as the only hope for the consolidation of Europe.”
Kennan’s visit to Hamburg, where he had served in the late 1920s, hit him especially hard. Berlin had always been a cold imperial city, haughty and pretentious. Such places “invited the wrath of gods and men.” But “poor old Hamburg”—it had been comfortable and good-humored, with no greater ambitions than “the common-sense humdrum of commerce and industry.” Its center had been obliterated in just three nights of incendiary raids in 1943. Seventy-five thousand people had died; three thousand still lay buried in the rubble.
[H]ere for the first time I felt an unshakeable conviction that no momentary military advantage—even if such could have been calculated to exist, could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values, built up laboriously by human hands, over the course of centuries, for purposes having nothing to do with war.
It was not enough to excuse this with “the screaming non-sequitur: ‘They did it to us.’” For if the West was to claim superiority over its adversaries, then “it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all.” This might seem, at first, naive. What it really required, though, was for the United States “to be militarily stronger than its adversaries by a margin sufficient to enable it to dispense with those means which can stave off defeat only at the cost of undermining victory.” It was a nebulous early anticipation of nuclear deterrence.
With all of this, Kennan found some things little changed. There was the Elbe, the harbor, and its hinterland. There were the same stolid commuters, engrossed in their newspapers and smoking bad cigarettes as they took ferries to work: only the seagulls, riding the waves as they always had done, seemed “to rejoice in the wind and the water and the first premonitions of spring.” Saint Pauli had in part survived: the facades of famous beer halls, the narrow streets stretching off into obscurity, “and at one point, under an archway, with the traditional uniform of fur neck-piece, short skirt and shiny handbag, . . . one of those merry damsels who once contributed so much to the life and lure of this port.”
A final day left time to visit a few villages outside Frankfurt, near where Kennan had been interned seven years earlier. They were mostly intact, but the burghers who inhabited them—once the backbone of Nazism—were now grotesque: they were like “awkward, aging beetles, who had survived some sort of flood and catastrophe and were still stubbornly crawling around the haunts from which they were supposed to have been removed.” They were throwbacks, however: they were not the future. On the train to Paris that evening,
I thought of the whole bizonal area stretching off behind us in the dusk; and it seemed to me that you could hear the great low murmur of human life beginning to stir again, beginning to recapture the rhythm of work and life and change, after years of shock and prostration. Here were tens of millions of human beings, of all ages and walks of life, reacting, as human beings always have and must, to the myriad of stimuli of heredity and education and climate and economic necessity and emotion. Whatever we did, they would no longer stand still in thought or in outlook.
Kennan did not cite Gibbon on this trip, but the historian’s warning about conquered provinces, which had so often raised doubts about the ability of the Nazis and the Soviets to control the territories they had taken, must have haunted him. For now, Kennan did write, the “ironic dialectics of military victory and defeat” were constraining what the Americans and their allies could do—or, at least, what he thought they should do:
[T]he victor, having taken upon himself all responsibility and all power, has nothing more to gain and only things to lose and is therefore enslaved by his own successes, whereas the vanquished, having nothing more to lose and only things to gain, . . . is free of responsibility, can afford to be clear-sighted and unpityingly realistic, and has only to wait, in order that things may again go his way.14
What Kennan saw on his trip provided little reason to think that a reunification of Germany, along the lines of Program A, could be imposed from the top down. A division of Germany was already taking place, with the consent of most Germans, from the bottom up. It was, Kennan thought, a Bismarckian moment, “when you hear the garments of the Goddess of Time rustling through the course of events. Who ignores this rustling, does so at his peril.”15
III.
Acheson, however, was keeping his options open. His immediate priority was the upcoming visit of the British and French foreign ministers, who would be in Washington for the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty early in April. Nothing had been said to them about Program A, and Acheson did not think this the right occasion to raise it. He was still worried, though, about being rushed too quickly into a division of Germany, and he was not yet ready to write off Kennan’s plan. Acheson’s first concern was process but he had not given up on purpose: what kind of Europe did the United States really want?16
NATO answered one part of that question: there was now an American commitment to defend the western portions of Europe against a Soviet attack and, by implication, an acknowledgment that the eastern parts would remain, for the foreseeable future, under Soviet domination. That made it hard to see how Germany—already divided into Soviet and western zones—could reunify anytime soon. Acheson had little choice but to proceed with Anglo-American-French planning for an independent West Germany. The purpose the new state would serve, however, was still unclear in his mind. Would it become an end in itself—a final nail in the coffin of a unified Europe—or would it be the means by which that idea might revive?
The issue had to be settled quickly, because the American, British, and French foreign ministers would be discussing the German question with their Soviet counterpart in Paris at the end of May. Acheson asked Philip Jessup, ambassador at large in the State Department, to supervise preparations, and Jessup unexpectedly endorsed Program A as a set of “optimum” proposals, not to be discarded either “in anticipation of possible Soviet objections [or] for fear that they might be accepted by the Soviet Union and thus be translated into reality.” Whatever happened, Kennan made it clear that Program A should be put forward
Acheson approved this procedure, got Truman’s permission to present these ideas to the allies, entrusted Jessup and Bohlen with the assignment, and on May 11 dictated instructions on how it should be done: “Just as the unification of Germany is not an end in itself, so the division of Germany is not an end in itself.” The test would be whether unification advanced the goal of a free Europe. The price for a Red Army withdrawal might well be too high, but
[a] possible regrouping of troops which would have the effect of removing Russian troops eastward and possibly ending their presence in and passage through the Eastern European countries may have important advantages. It deserves the most careful study.... No outcome—even a good one—is free from objection. Any decision will have some dangers. But this is not a time for avoiding decisions.
Kennan himself could have written this. But then, on the next morning, James Reston published a simplified version of Program A on the front page of
